Miscellaneous server changes, SpamAssassin changes TONIGHT

Keeping up with the great shake-up as of late, there are some more internal changes going on with the servers.

1. maildrop no longer falls back to a getpwnam() lookup if lookup fails in the PostgreSQL database.  What was happening here is that Postfix handed the message off to maildrop for delivery and it checked against the PostgreSQL database for delivery locations (this is what “Manage Mailboxes” does).  Ideally, if an account were disabled (gray + italicized), then lookup would fail and delivery would cease.  Unfortunately what ended up happening is that maildrop fell back to getpwnam() on the full e-mail address, which incidentally is how users are managed on the server.  Although a user may have gone over quota and was then disabled to prevent further mail from piling up, in actuality it still found the user and hopelessly tried to deliver the message.
2. maildrop’s permissions have also been relaxed.  Many users were editing the .mailfilter files and uploading with the default 644 permissions.  maildrop is rather finnicky and requires 600 in order to be read for security reasons.
3. A global filter file has been added to all sites, named /etc/maildroprc.  This filter is executed prior to individual filters in $HOME/.mailfilter. Because we will invariably have a conflict between the new global filtering definition in /etc/maildroprc and individual SpamAssassin calls (xfilter “spamc -u $USER@$HOSTNAME”) , SpamAssassin filtering will be deferred to the global filtering file leaving local filters in $HOME/.mailfilter to handle the post-processing.  This shouldn’t pose a significant change for anyone.  A global filter allows for easy filtering across all users — something I’ve seen constantly requested.
4. File descriptors on Apache have been increased from 1,024 to 4,096 in response to the new bandwidth logs.
5. The maximum number of concurrent clients on Apache has also increased from 256 to 384 following an isolated occurrence on Image late last week.
6. FTP bandwidth data was garbage and has been purged.  Likely it’ll be necessary to parse the xferlog for transfer stats.

Filtering rules will take effect tonight between the hours of 12 AM – 2 AM EDT (-0400 GMT).  Your old filter file will be renamed to .mailfilter-apis.  The only change is that everything between “#BEGIN SA_CONFIG” and “#END SA_CONFIG” will be stripped from the filter file, leaving most folks with an empty filter.

If you have any other usage questions, head over to the Resource Center.